[CentOS] hardware issues? driver issues?

[Peter Kjellström]

On Wednesday 07 March 2012 11.17.15 m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Got a bunch of servers from Penguin. Supermicro m/b's H8QG6. We put a 3tb
> drive in for additional workspace for the users, and some of them won't
> read, others will go for weeks, then spit out DRDY errors. lshw shows the
> controller as an ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA.
...
> Now, I've been working on one with Penguin. I noticed one thing, that it
> was set to native IDE. After googling, I saw that the most recent spec,
> which included EIDE, should be good to petabytes... but I tried resetting
> it to AHCI anyway.
> 
> The user ran one job, ok... then another last night, and it's spitting the
> same errors.
... 
> Mar  7 00:53:28 <server> kernel: ata2.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
...
> 40/00:04:20:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
...
> Mar  7 00:53:28 <server> kernel: ata2: hard resetting link

While writing the drive timed out and the link to it was then subjected to a 
hard reset. This is not normal and usually points to bad drive or buggy 
firmware.

Have you had a look at smartdata for the drive(s)? (you may want to run the 
smart selftests)

Also, I'd suggest you test it in a controlled environment. For example, can 
any of your drives survive a full surface write? (dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M of=..) 
Full surface read? Do the tests against /dev/sdX to be sure (excludes 
partitioning, filesystems, volume management, etc.)

Do note that writing your drive full of zeros _will_ destroy your data (I 
really hope that's stating the obvious...).

/Peter
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